Sport: Circuit Riders

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In 1926, the late Tex Rickard saw Dick Shelton at a rodeo, urged him to become a pugilist. He refused. Now 32, he has for five years been considered one of the ablest steer-wrestlers in the U. S. Six feet, 3 in. tall, 225 lb., built like Jack Dempsey, he hunts lions and deer in Texas and Mexico when not performing in rodeos, helps his wife, Reine, one of the 20 U. S. women who make a living by trick-riding, train their son to handle broncos.

Tad Lucas is the most famed female rodeo trick-rider and bronco-rider. She makes $12,000 a year, designs and sews her own costumes, of which she always has at least a dozen on hand, lives outside Fort Worth, Tex., with her rodeo-performer husband and their two children. Her costume-cleaning bill is $5 a day. She wears sheer silk underwear, uses Black Narcissus perfume, likes red riding breeches.

Promoter of last week's World Series Rodeo, Colonel William T. Johnson was a rancher until he lost $40,000 promoting a wild west show for an American Legion Convention in San Antonio six years ago. He decided to promote his money back. Now he puts on five rodeos a year in Boston, New York, Fort Worth, San Antonio and Indianapolis, expects to make $1,000,000. Fat, wrinkled, round-faced, his contract in New York brings him $75,000. In return, he furnishes 628 head of livestock. He says rodeo, not rodeo, owns three cattle ranches in Texas which he visits in a Packard sedan loaded with soft drinks, loses $6,000 a year in loans to irresponsible cowboys. His right-hand man is "Gorilla" Mike Hastings, who buys bucking horses at from $100 to $1,000 depending on their unwillingness to be ridden. Hastings became a bulldogger 25 years ago, when there were only two other white bulldoggers in the world.